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Monday, January 09, 2006

History Channelling

The
French have been cool before.

f(X)=0.
It seems like a little thing. How many of us watch the History Channel
to add an interesting drib or drab to our general education? Not as
many as tune in to Desperate
Housewives, no doubt, but those who do watch probably expect to
be treated like intelligent adults -- say, a cut or two above the
audience for the old "In Search of" series narrated by Leonard Nimoy.
That show at least had a standard disclaimer acknowledging that there
might be other interpretations of the material presented. No such luck
with last night's History Channel offering called Little Ice Age, Big Chill. Here's
the description from the network's website:

Of course, the news that the Little Ice Age amounted to a few degrees
drop in average temperature didn't make it into the promos or the first
dramatic scenes of the show itself. We did get to see a band of monks
laboring their way up to an alpine glacier to exorcise (Fools!) the
"demon" ice flow that was threatening a 17th century mountain village.
We saw microscope slides of what purported to be Black Plague germs and
illustrations of violent activity in the French Revolution accompanied
by assurances that these events were precipitated or exacerbated by the
Little Ice Age. We were also told that the leaders of the day (you
know, church idiots) had no way of understanding the vast
climatological forces arrayed against them before we were informed that
these forces had contrived to lower temperatures by approximately three
degrees celsius. Then just to make sure we didn't underestimate the
impact of three degrees, the narrator plunged into a description of
just how hard life was for the medieval peasants of the time, who had
no FEMA or other government agencies to look after them when disaster
struck.

Is it petty to point out that the narrator was Edward Herrmann, whose
voice has become synonymous in TV land with FDR and the golden age of
New Deal liberalism that the evil corporatist Christian Republicans
keep trying to repeal? Okay, so it is petty. But it may be fair to
suggest that the refined tones of an old school Bucknell Phi Beta Kappa
do add a ring of credibility to a script, whether it's presenting
documented history-slash-science or mere speculative propaganda.

And it's definitely not petty to suggest that Little Ice Age was put
together so sloppily and disingenuously that it provokes many more
questions than it could possibly have intended.

The producers' intentions aren't at all hard to decipher. The climate
alarmists
have been busy for some time now redefining global warming as global
climate change. Too many of us commoners have been too unreasonably
resistant to the idea that global warming is responsible, as we've been
told, for colder
than average winters as well as warmer than average summers. The real
objective of the smart people is to pass worldwide laws reducing CO2
emissions, since these are the primary component of climate conditions
that can be attributed to human beings. Therefore, the "emergency" that
has to be sold to the populace is rapid climate change -- up, down, or
sideways -- which mandates handing power over to scientists and
globalist bureaucrats who know better what's good for us than do
tainted nationalist institutions like the Bush administration and,
well, the Bush administration.

So the message we need to understand is that rapid climate change can
happen and when it does happen it's disastrous. There aren't too many
avenues open for proving that point. In fact, there's only one: finding
instances when rapid climate change has already happened in recorded
history
and demonstrating that those changes had enormous impacts on society
and the general welfare. It's also helpful if you can make it look like
you're not shilling for the global warming crowd, which makes people
suspicious. That's why the Little Ice Age is so perfect. If you can
make them believe in sudden cooling, they're more likely to believe in
sudden warming, too, and then you can always explain later on that even
sudden cooling is simply a regional permutation of sudden warming. Or
could be the next time it happens. Or something.

The Show

Anyway, Little Ice Age gives
us a twofer, because apparently it followed another odd period called
the "Medieval Warming," which was actually responsible for the
emergence of European civilization from the Dark Ages. All those
beautiful cathedrals erected by the evil Roman Catholic church
were not so much symbols of cultural renaissance as manifestations of
the natural optimism created by balmier days and more luxuriant crops.
Can you start to see how helpless the old-fashioned institutions are in
the face of climate change?

Well, if you can't, that's why it's so important to understand the
catastrophe of the Little Ice Age. For example, if you thought the
French Revolution was caused by a series of incredibly bad kings who
raised taxes to the stratosphere (that's NEVER the problem, is it?),
you're wrong. It was caused by colder temperatures that eliminated the
tiny margin of crop surpluses on which the peasants lived. That's why
they responded by dreaming up all those ridiculous notions about
liberty, equality, and fraternity and killing every aristocrat in sight.

There's also a complicated argument about how the cooling caused the
rampant spread of the Black Plague, which is very convincing if you
didn't see the History Channel's earlier documentary about how Black
Plague probably wasn't Bubonic Plague, which means we
don't really know what it was, where it came from, or why it died
out eventually.

And to drive it all home, we can even see how the Little Ice Age lasted
almost all the way to the 20th century and froze up New York harbor,
which we
have honest-to-(er)goodness photographs of, so are you convinced yet?

Don't forget that anything which has happened once can happen again,
even if
it happens for different reasons this time around. What you should all
be asking yourselves is, who can protect us this time around and keep
all the bad things from happening. Can they do it soon, please, or
before that even?

Uh, not so fast

Okay. Let's say that there was
a Little Ice Age which lasted, as the
History Channel tells us, from c. 1300 to 1850 A.D (er, A.C.E.). And
let's say, before
that, there was a "Medieval Warming," which lasted from c. 900 to 1300
A.C.E. The warming wouldn't have been caused by CO2 emissions because
of
the relatively low incidence of SUVs during the late middle ages, and
the cooling wouldn't have been caused by the Kyoto protocols of 1295
because there weren't any.

This creates a twofold problem right out of the box. First, these are
-- in human terms -- quite lengthy periods of climate change that more
or less have to have been caused by natural phenomena rather than human
screw-ups.

Second, it doesn't take advanced mathematics to calculate that the
current normal -- i.e., non-warmed, non-cooled -- climate ideal we're
so
desperate not to destroy with CO2 emissions is at most about 150 years
in
duration. Couldn't it, in fact, be something other than "normal" --
i.e., a blip, a transition, an aberration in the natural dynamics of
the earth's weather? And how can we possibly claim that our
historically recorded temperature data, which began sometime toward
the end of the Little Ice Age and ended sometime this morning, is
telling us
anything significant about "trends" we're trying to project 100 or more
years into the future? Further, if the weather is really changing
again, it's the third time it's done so in the last 700 years, and what
possible basis do we have for believing that we have the power to alter
the cycle? What exactly would constitute stability in this timeframe --
how would we know for sure that we'd either secured it or lost it in
the first place?

Are you laughing yet? Well, wait. It gets better. If you look beyond
the History Channel and the gentle authority of Edward Herrmann's
narration, it turns out that there's reason to doubt whether there ever
was a "Little Ice Age" or (ta-da!) a "Medieval Warming."

With respect to cooling, there's this (just for one example) at RealClimate.org:

In the climatological literature the
LIA has now come to be used to characterize a more recent, shorter
recent interval from around A.D. 1300 to 1450 until A.D. 1850 to 1900
during which regional evidence in Europe and elsewhere suggest
generally cold conditions. Variations in the literature abound with
regard to the precise definition, and the term is often used by
paleoclimatologists and glaciologists without formal dates
attached... The utility of the term in describing past climate
changes at regional scales has been questioned... A number of
myths or exaggerations can still be found in the literature with regard
to the details of this climate period... These include the citation of
frost fairs on the River Thames as evidence of extreme cold conditions
in England. Thames freeze-overs (and sometimes frost fairs) only
occurred 22 times between 1408 and 1814 when the old London Bridge
constricted flow through its multiple piers and restricted the tide
with a weir. After the Bridge was replaced in the 1830s the tide came
further upstream and freezes no longer occurred, despite a number of
exceptionally cold winters. Winter 1962/3, for example, was the third
coldest winter recorded in instrumental records extending back to 1659,
yet the river only froze upstream of the present tidal limit. It is
also sometimes claimed that the extreme cold of the "Little Ice Age"
impeded the navigation of a Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic
during the early 19th century. However, an exhaustive study of 19th
century explorer logs for the region yields no evidence of conditions
that would be considered unusually cold by modern standards.

Period of relative warmth in some
regions of the Northern Hemisphere in comparison with the subsequent
several centuries. Also referred to as the Medieval Warm Epoch (MWE).
As with the 'Little Ice Age'(LIA) no well-defined precise date range
exists. The dates A.D. 900–1300 cover most ranges generally used in the
literature... As with the LIA, numerous myths can still be found in the
literature with regard to the details of this climate period. These
include the citation of the cultivation of vines in Medieval England,
and the settlement of Iceland and southwestern Greenland about 1000
years ago, as evidence of unusual warmth at this time. As noted by
Jones and Mann (2004)... arguments that such evidence supports
anomalous global warmth during this time period is based on faulty
logic and/or misinterpretations of the available evidence.

It's not our place to say that these arguments prove the History
Channel wrong. What's far more important is that scientists are
apparently still not in complete agreement about what was going on with
weather and temperature in the period between 1300 and 1900. That's
kind of a large gap if you're pretending to know what's been going on
between 1900 and 2005, especially when you're planning to reengineer
the entire global economy based on what you think you know about
weather and
temperature today.

Conclusion

So there may have been protracted but stable warm and cool periods
during
the past 700 years. Or not. The climate in the period from 1900 to 2005
may represent a third such period of relative stability. Or not..
Alternatively, the past 100 to 150 years may represent a period of
gradual warming. Or not. If the climate is warming (or cooling) (or
just getting more extreme), then the cause of whatever it's doing may
be CO2 emissions from our factories and SUVs. Or not. Therefore we
should just trust the scientists who are so rigidly sure of themselves
that they're willing to overlook the nonexistence of valid economic
prediction models and bet the farm on long-term weather prediction
models, of which not one has ever been proven accurate. And we should
be unfailingly grateful to the slightly confused but highly self
confident seers -- and their minions -- who keep
swallowing their exasperation to help all us dummies understand this
particular science of doom.

One way "societies choose to fail or
succeed" is by choosing what to worry about. The Western world has
delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any
other civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great
cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his
bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul
Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo
famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of
Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury
by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead
and gas by 1993.

None of these things happened... In fact, quite the opposite is
happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out
of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of
the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest
country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's
dying--its population is falling calamitously... The default mode of
our elites is that anything that happens--from terrorism to
tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of
Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a
civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack
the energy and conviction to defend itself."

If we wrote a letter to Edward Herrmann, do you think he'd
explain it to us?